‘Terrible cost for the world’: Taiwan must not fall, warns Scott Morrison
Scott Morrison has warned abandoning Taiwan would be ‘appeasement’, urging Western nations to boost military spending while Donald Trump’s presence deters Chinese invasion.
Scott Morrison has warned abandoning Taiwan to the Chinese Communist Party would amount to “appeasement”, urging the West and its partners to rapidly boost military spending and prepare their societies for conflict while Donald Trump’s presence in the White House deters Chinese President Xi Jinping from invading the self-governed territory.
The former prime minister and architect of the AUKUS submarine pact said if China was able to seize Taiwan, it would come at a “terrible cost” for the world, banishing US forces from East Asia and providing Beijing with a “springboard” to project military power into the Pacific.
His comments, in a speech to a Taiwanese defence think tank on Wednesday, followed warnings from Australia’s top national security official, Andrew Shearer, that the security environment was rapidly deteriorating as China and other authoritarian regimes sought to “distract and divide us … and chip away at our resolve”.
The US congress also sounded a bipartisan call on Wednesday (AEST) for America and its allies to stand firm against Chinese coercion, amid questions by a senior Republican senator on whether the US could rely on Australian support in the event of a Taiwan contingency.
Anthony Albanese has been determined to stabilise Australia’s ties with Beijing after the tensions of the Morrison years, and has pointedly resisted US calls for the nation to pre-commit to defending Taiwan from Chinese aggression. But Mr Morrison said he was concerned that many in the West believed it was “better not to poke the dragon”.
“This should be understood as appeasement,” he said, arguing it was important to “be clear about what is at stake”.
This would include the pushing back of US forces to the “second island chain” beyond the Philippine Sea, Mr Morrison said, “diminishing their ability to provide an effective security counterbalance”.
He said Beijing could then project power into the region, “pushing missile arcs deep into the western Pacific” and exposing more states to routine coercion.
Mr Morrison said he believed Mr Xi’s 2027 deadline for his military forces to be ready to take Taiwan was likely to pass without incident, arguing “the presence of President Trump of itself is likely to deter any hasty action by President Xi in the short term”.
“However, that only takes us to the end of 2028,” he said.
“The task now therefore is to take advantage of potential extra time and get on with the work of resilience and deterrence.”
He said if Taiwan – which lies at the heart of the West’s dominance of the global semiconductor industry – were to fall to China, “there would not be a corner of the globe that would be unaffected”.
“Failure by the US and its allies to prevent or reverse the seizure of Taiwan leads regional states to accept PRC (People’s Republic of China) primacy and even hegemony in the region,” Mr Morrison said.
“This in turn creates a more conducive environment for the spread of autocratic and authoritarian regimes in the region, under the PRC’s shelter.
“Further afield we also cannot ignore the encouragement this would give to autocratic regimes such as Russia, Iran and many more to chance their arm.”
He added that the economic consequences of a full Chinese invasion of Taiwan “would make the global Covid-19 shutdown look like a sneeze”.
Mr Morrison, whose government was slapped with $20bn worth of trade bans by Beijing, said he made his comments as a former head of government “who experienced the PRC’s coercion and intimidation first hand”.
Mr Albanese, in contrast, talked up his personal relationship with Mr Xi during his July trip to China, saying he had no reason not to trust the autocratic leader.
A US congressional committee heard on Wednesday (AEST) that the Chinese navy’s surprise live-fire drill off Australia’s coast earlier this year and its circumnavigation of the continent was an attempt to “intimidate Australia”.
Democratic senator for Delaware Chris Coons, the ranking member of the Senate foreign relations subcommittee on East Asia, the Pacific, and international cybersecurity policy, warned that China was trying to “change the facts on the ground in the Indo-Pacific, just as (Vladimir) Putin did with Crimea in 2014”.
“They’re hoping they can salami slice their way into asserting control of the region and forcing the United States out,” he said.
“If we don’t change course, if we continue to dole out concessions to China and look the other way as they change facts on the ground, we may well lose the fight for the century.”
Senator Coons and the Republican chair of the subcommittee, Pete Ricketts, said Australia had been one of the nations in the Indo-Pacific subjected to Beijing’s more aggressive “ICAD (illegal, coercive, aggressive, and deceptive) activities”.
Senator Coons said the circumnavigation of Australia by a large Chinese naval task group was “an enormous show of force intended to intimidate Australia”.
But in a discussion on Taiwan, former US defence attache to Australia Raymond Powell told the committee that Australia was “not the 51st state and does not necessarily sign up to everything that we decide to do even though they have been extraordinarily consistent in supporting US operations throughout the decades”.
Republican senator for Texas John Cornyn said that after speaking to Australian parliamentarians he had come to “question who might join us” in any “collective defence of Taiwan that the United States was involved in”.
“Who can we rely on, besides ourselves?” he asked.
Addressing a Senate estimates hearing in Canberra this week, Mr Shearer, the Office of National Intelligence director-general, said grey zone conflict was now “central to strategic rivalry in the global struggle between a new axis of authoritarian powers and democracies”.
“Cyber attacks, political interference, disinformation, economic coercion and the use of paramilitary and proxy forces to pressure and intimidate are now routine,” he said.
“These methods exploit our openness and restraint. They are hard to counter, and the objectives are clear: to weaken cohesion within democracies such as Australia, and between allies, and to make the world safer for authoritarianism.”
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